Greenland S
Department of Epidemiology, UCLA School of Public Health, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1772, USA.
Int J Epidemiol. 1998 Aug;27(4):543-8. doi: 10.1093/ije/27.4.543.
This article reviews concepts of classical logic and induction, with special attention to the controversies surrounding Popperian claims that induction is impossible and does not exist. I argue that some of the controversy is semantic, and hence Popperian criticisms of induction must be translated carefully into ordinary language to be appreciated by inductively oriented epidemiologists. With this translation, the substance of the debate is not whether induction is possible (it is) or exists (it does), but whether and how we should employ probabilistic reasoning about hypotheses in epidemiological inference.
本文回顾了经典逻辑和归纳法的概念,特别关注围绕波普尔主义观点的争议,即归纳法是不可能的且不存在。我认为部分争议是语义上的,因此波普尔对归纳法的批评必须谨慎地翻译成日常语言,以便以归纳法为导向的流行病学家能够理解。通过这种翻译,辩论的实质并非归纳法是否可能(它是可能的)或是否存在(它是存在的),而是在流行病学推断中我们是否以及如何对假设运用概率推理。